Bush Brain Drain?

The American Spectator has a fatalistic assessment of the Bush administration's prospects to get anything accomplished in the rest of this term. It's the kind of piece that always turns up in the wake of a highly publicized fiasco, so it should be taken with several grains of salt. But it includes a very telling blind quote which would go a long way toward explaining the Katrina management failure:

"What happened was that some of the best people who were working in the Administration during the first term, but who weren't necessarily Bush campaign members or weren't particularly close to the White House, jumped when they saw opportunities being filled by under-qualified but more politically connected people," says a current Administration senior staffer in a Cabinet department. "In this department we lost three quarters of the people who should have been encouraged to stay, and most of them left simply because they had received no indication they would be considered for better or different opportunities. And many of these folks would have stayed."